SEED and  Plant

The Vision

Gardens are increasingly becoming more popular in schools. While the rise of school gardening programs have led to some remarkable outcomes, educators are seeking to tap into the raw benefits of garden education and seek pedagogical ways to lead, engage and embrace experiential learning. This in turn is meant to help tackle societal concerns such as environmental sustainability, childhood obesity and garden literacy. While our venture ensures that students have an ongoing connection with the land, the science and plants, we’re dedicated in ensuring to bring the best content for teachers. With a plethora of school gardens spanning the globe, there is solid evidence that school gardens can enhance student learning from their social, health and academics. School gardens help promote conversation and engagement in health, well-being and critical thought of individual students in multiple interdependent domains, including strengthening the school community and fostering a positive youth development. Current research indicates positive changes in students overall social-emotional well-being, however the research also indicates that students attitudes towards changing their dietary behavior. While our venture focuses on the use of seeds and gardening, the greater umbrella of it all is to shape students critical thought on sustainability, gaden literature, peer relationships and their ability to play with science. Our venture wants students to feel confident in their ability to complete the gardening tasks as the months move forward. We hope to continue empowering students and teachers through maintaining plant health in their gardens.

Here at Seeds and Plants we will help implement your very own school garden program. Our goal is to make our product accessible. Our aim is meant for every students and teachers to have access to our program, embracing an open, shareable movement for garden education. While our hope is that all schools can use the program, we want to empower those disadvantaged, lower income schools to be able to have access to the gardening content to help foster and implement a culturally focused education program. While the literature indicates that gardens help foster education, social, health benefits of growing your own food, gardening and cooking can also help in leveraging other wonderful benefits found in the classrooms such as learning about culture, language and science. At Seed and Plant we have tested and implemented these program is schools all over the province of BC and have used method based research approach in all of our pilot programs. The goal was simple, we wanted to invest in a process that allowed students to research their own practice. We partnered with The University of British Columbia’s environmental science department as well as the faculty of outdoor education to help in the research phase of our pilot program. This was aided through interviews, observation of students and teachers. We’ve witnessed that the gardening enabled a sense of belonging among students and teachers and forming a connection with the land, many of which do not have suitable interaction with, especially in denser cities.

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The Problem

Education has increasingly become a ground for flashy applications, trendy learning methods and saturated technological systems that claim to help students learn. While progress is essential in an ever changing school climate, it is important to embrace and encourage skills such as garden literacy in a modern day context. With all of the dualities, intersectionalities and socio-emotional and socio-economical differences in schools it is important to bring attention to a tool grounded in research that help students empower themselves in the use of environmental science and collaboration. Gardening is a skill that will be essential in our current climate, with cities expanding, and a connection to the land that is becoming lost, urban gardening is the the key to the future. Students who go to school hungry will not learn. This can lead to many other side effects such as a decrease in physical activity, a retention on cognitive abilities and disinterest in school overall. The problem is simple. We do not have a connection with the land. It is lost. Most educational institution have a mandate and curriculum to cover. Seed and Plant will help guide students and teachers through garden education and how to start your own garden program at school. Seed and Plant hopes to shift the way we think about education and how we educate. Students are conditioned to reach high grades rather than embrace the learning process. Educators have broken the link established by leaders in experiential education, where a student is only as good based on what they know rather what can they actually show, how they can interact with the content and troubleshoot problems they face in everyday life. Students should be able to apply skills in ways that are real, raw and true. Educations have fabricated a false way of learning by making the learning process synthetic, rather than real. We want students to able to smash what educational systems have established throughout history, which is only developing academics, rather than vocational and life skills, empowering their social and personal development. Seed and Plant addresses the current need for environmental education, reflection on the cultural, economical and social values of our modern communities. There is a need and want for experimental, holistic and natural pedagogy. Seed and Plant have integrated curriculum with grounded research in environmental education, agricultural literacy and have made it possible to go beyond the classroom.

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The Solution

Seed and Plant are committed to offer school garden curricula built on the model of hands-on, garden-based, inquiry-based environmental and science education. School garden programs are the solution of the future for students looking to develop true skills in plant science, but more importantly, our programs will form a community of individuals, offering a gathering, a setting if you will, for interaction among members of the school community, encouraging networking with the great body of the community and a sense of connectedness. The idea of Seed and Plant is to incorporate the natural outdoors as an integral part of a student's education. Though the idea is not new, we feel that we’re hoping to extend a philosophy of doing, rather than a philosophy of watching. Seed and Plant offers researched based solutions that amalgamate experimental based education, ecological literacy, environmental awareness, nutrition, agricultural literacy and an eye for human empathy and care towards nature. The solution lies in teaching students awareness through true, concrete personal discovery in a real, natural setting where students will learn environmental, ecological and human principles that govern all of life. Accordingly, students will be able to develop a sense of interconnectedness with the land in which they develop and nurture. Teachers, this is your opportunity to explore forward thinking methods and try garden based learning!

 

School gardens will allow student to:

• Engage in school curriculum, while having fun.

• Develop an awareness to the environment.

• Collaborate and work as a teach, with students, teachers and other school staff.

• Students will be moving! This is a perfect example of non-traditional physical education.

• Students will make connections between the food we eat and agriculture.

• Students will develop and awareness by caring for living things.

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Why School Gardens

Working in a school garden is a powerful tool for learning. With gardening, a student can become an effective caretaker, a grounded worker that is using a skill hardly seen in schools. Learning to work within a school garden will give students the opportunity to engage in age old agricultural practices on a small scale, learning about the responsibilities and impacts of cultivation of the land. Students explore many facets that make up living and nonliving matter that help maintain life. These skills are to meant to help foster and cultivate an understanding of what it takes to develop something from a simple seed. While our principal is simple, to plant a seed and watch it grow, the greater goal is to embrace garden based education as student and a teacher. Students and teachers will work, symbiotically, much like the living organisms they are handling, to understand a greater understand of our environment. With many students not having access to a green space or exposure to gardening, this is a chance to get close to nature. With Seed and Plant, we offer the material and resources for those who lack access to gardening spaces and help foster a seamless exploration based model for outdoor education. Garden based education is a model that should embrace a community and here at Seed and Plant we want to encourage that by allowing you to become gardeners. Students will establish a deep rooted connection with the earth with our program, while encouraging them to make their own connections with living matter.